


Without Hope of Assuagement or Release

by akathecentimetre



Category: King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)
Genre: Arthurian legend - Freeform, Gen, Magic, Occasional french, The Sword in the Stone, living death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2017-06-18
Packaged: 2018-11-13 10:49:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11183553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: A missing perspective from the stone that bore the sword. (Uther-centric gen angst.)





	Without Hope of Assuagement or Release

*

His life had taught him to endure much, but he would not be ashamed to admit – were he truly, manifestly conscious – that this was too much to bear.

He was taught in fragments, when he himself was a boy, of the eternal tortures of Prometheus disemboweled; of Tantalus forever unsatisfied, starving and parched despite succour being so close within reach.

Now he is made of stone, and he sinks as though the black pit of Tartarus is opening up to receive him, and the unending torture is that he does not know what has happened to his son.

It looks like the Blacklands, he thinks, on those rare occasions when his sightless eyes see beyond the prison his body has become – when he has a body again, when, he thinks, he must be a guest in someone else's dreams.

(Sometimes, he thinks he sees Igraine there. She is whipped by high winds, disintegrating into ash, and what is left of him to rage in the rock seethes with jealousy.)

His knees ache from kneeling, so he cannot run after the distant cloaked figure, standing on the black hilltops, that he wishes was Merlin; his shoulders stoop, borne down by water, by the shadow of Vortigern's tower whose growth reminds him of the passage of time.

And always there is the sword, the damned, beloved sword.

It whispers to him in heathen French, a tool of the fae. Whatever familiarity he might have gained with it in life – whatever friendship, whatever understanding that made his blood sing in his veins – in this half-death it despises him. It seeks his insides, and hates that it cannot impale him further; it wants to be free, and it whispers this incessantly, seeking its mistress, seeking a master.

 _What use your work, gatekeeper_ , it hisses, as the years dwindle and the shadow grows taller.

He takes comfort, in these latter days, in the cool touch of water that eases the still-raw rip in what was his flesh; in even the fetid, choked streams of the Blacklands. In the act of following in Igraine's footsteps (for he knows they are hers) in the dusty, distant earth.

He forgives himself for Vortigern, accursed and profane; he tries to forgive himself for the parlous state in which his people are no doubt left.

He feels it slowly: the churn of waves underneath and around him, and the gathering dawn. If he could, he would weep with the hope of it.

The taut, frigid air comes suddenly. He is thrust into the world, and finds it unworthy – grey, made of shale and cloud. And when the first hands reach down to try and separate him from what he has, through great effort, absorbed into himself as surely as if it were his own flesh, the pain of it nearly sends him fleeing irrevocably into the dark.

Being stepped on is a new indignity, but he is resolved to bear it, as indeed he must. He _is_ the gatekeeper, he thinks one brightening morning, and grabs at this thought with everything he has left, telling Excalibur that it must wait, that their fates are as one, and that he promises – he swears, he takes oaths on his dragon-bound blood – he will not give it up to any man but the one.

 _Il vient,_ it whispers, finally, excited, panting. _Il vient, il vient_.

_Le rey, il vient._

The hand feels like his own. Broad-palmed, long-fingered, calloused and scarred. He can trace every whorl of skin, every life-line, every ridge of proof that something of him still belongs to the land of the living; every assurance that he can now pass fully into the land of the dead.

The sword is pleased. It does not say farewell as he crumbles.

In the Blacklands, the grass turns green beneath his feet as he walks into the light.

*

**Author's Note:**

> TEll me when shall these wearie woes haue end,  
> Or shall their ruthlesse torment neuer cease:  
> but al my dayes in pining languor spend,  
> without hope of aswagement or release.  
> Is there no meanes for me to purchace peace,  
> or make agreement with her thrilling eyes:  
> but that their cruelty doth still increace,  
> and dayly more augment my miseryes.  
> But when ye haue shewed all extremityes,  
> then thinke how litle glory ye haue gayned:  
> by slaying him, whose lyfe though ye despyse,  
> mote haue your life in honour long maintayned.  
> But by his death which some perhaps will mone,  
> ye shall condemned be of many a one. 
> 
> \--- Spenser's _Amoretti_ , Sonnet 36


End file.
